[ExI] Limiting factor to the Intelligence Singularity?

[Kelly Anderson]

Einstein proposed that nothing could achieve the speed of light
because it gained mass as it got closer to that speed.

I wonder if something similar might affect intellectual progress.
Though there is no c there, so it might not hold together entirely.
Hang with this for a second though, as there is a counter exponential
at play.

As we grope into the future, there is a trend away from the single
brilliant inventor. Edison had a whole lab of people, some of whom
were clearly smarter than he. Eli Whitney pretty much invented the
cotton gin by himself relying on only a few simple precedent ideas. By
the time we get to super colliders, fusion reactors and rockets, you
need a village of scientists and engineers to make progress.

Is it possible that the exponential curve towards the singularity has
a hidden negative signal of increased resistance to progress because
of the required size of the team? Might this be one reason that we
haven't yet progressed beyond the jumbo jet airliner? Is that
indicative of the future of a lot of things? How many Intel employees
does it take to design the next iteration of their CPU? Yes, they have
computational minds that help them with layout and such now... but you
can hardly say Oppenheimer was the inventor of the atomic bomb. He was
the face of the project and coordinated the efforts to some degree,
but you can't make that level of progress without a sea of minds. Musk
has ideas (or maybe his people do that too) and finances them, but the
actual work is carried forward by an army of engineering ants. As I
believe in emergence as a deep concept, I tend to see groups more than
individuals, though I value individual contribution greatly.

Perhaps my mind has wandered too freely and it is time to go work on
my own, much simpler, inventions, as they seem to constantly be
broken.

-Kelly